Rather than recreate Google Drive, Yahoo integrates Dropbox into Mail

Yahoo has no cloud of its own, but Dropbox has become part of Yahoo Mail.

For all of Yahoo's corporate problems, it still has one of the world's most widely used e-mail products (and is possibly the market share leader in the US according to ComScore statistics from late last year).

But Yahoo clearly lacks some of the technological advantages enjoyed by rivals Google and Microsoft, including having an offering in the fast-growing area of cloud storage. Google integrated Google Drive with Gmail and Microsoft integrated SkyDrive with Hotmail. Yahoo has nothing comparable.

Instead of creating its own cloud storage service, Yahoo decided on an approach that may end up being better for its users—a partnership with Dropbox. Starting sometime today, Yahoo Mail customers will be able to use Dropbox within webmail.

"You can add stuff from Dropbox to any e-mail message and save attachments back to Dropbox, too," Dropbox wrote in a blog post. "Since this integration is Dropbox-powered, you can even send that big album of vacation pics without worrying about the 25MB file limit."

The integration will be available in Yahoo webmail in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Yahoo users not yet registered for Dropbox will be able to create a Dropbox account from within Yahoo Mail, Yahoo's blog said.

The Dropbox integration looks as if its geared toward desktop Web browsers, but Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is also trying to bolster Yahoo's presence on mobile devices. Yahoo's latest move on the mobile front was to purchase Summly, a mobile news app maker founded by a 17-year-old entrepreneur.

This is really cool and I wish GMail did this. There's no reason it has to even be a "partnership" as Dropbox has an API. Presumably a Google Labs engineer could enable "experimental" support fr Dropbox with a widget

I figure Yahoo will get a commission based off any free to paid conversions that can be attributed to them. Makes sense. They need to partner with an inline productivity suite next. That's one of the reasons I left Yahoo; Google and Microsoft offer a lot of good, useful services .

If only Yahoo! would expend some effort trying to make Yahoo! mail actually work right. My ISP outsourced email to Yahoo! a couple of years ago and reliability has been terrible to the point that I have almost entirely moved to GMail. And I am likely actually paying for Yahoo! mail as I am sure that my ISP is paying them something.

Although i'm no google fan, I'm currently thinking of moving off yahoo plus to gmail.

I like the idea of integrated Dropbox functionality, but an not yet a big user of Dropbox.

My most urgent pressing need is for the apple mail client on my family's various macs to stop having authentication problems (and always asking for the damn yahoo p/w - no similar problem exists with our many iOS devices.)

Yahoo have to get with apple and fix this before they loos long time paid subscribers like me.

As we are also traveling between the USA and various, non English speaking, destinations, it would help if yahoo would roll out its two factor authentication to make it work in major overseas markets (same for apple.)

These two improvements, as well as an apple own password manager and cross device syncing functionality are what we need much more than Dropbox enhancements.

So, why would I want to give Yahoo my Dropbox account details? *sigh* Remember the days when you were supposed to keep your account details private? Sadly, we're being conditioned to routinely break the most basic of online security measures.

This is a nice idea to avoid the overhead and limits of attachments, but it's not clear how this works when the recipient isn't a Dropbox user. If they have to sign up to get the attachment, that's a non-starter.

This is really cool and I wish GMail did this. There's no reason it has to even be a "partnership" as Dropbox has an API. Presumably a Google Labs engineer could enable "experimental" support fr Dropbox with a widget

Presumably google wants you using google drive, and staying within the googleverse.

If only Yahoo! would expend some effort trying to make Yahoo! mail actually work right. My ISP outsourced email to Yahoo! a couple of years ago and reliability has been terrible to the point that I have almost entirely moved to GMail. And I am likely actually paying for Yahoo! mail as I am sure that my ISP is paying them something.

Back in the early 2000s, I used several Yahoo! services, including Mail, Messenger, Groups (they had bought egroups, if I remember correctly), and Briefcase. As time went on, it seemed that Yahoo! services were... increasingly clunky and unreliable. They cancelled POP access for mail (for free accounts). Their web mail would take forever to load, and had multiple flashy ads. Messenger was clunky and would not work half the time.

Around the same time, Google embodied the exact opposite philosophy; their offerings were less flashy, but they simply worked. I switched to Gmail/Google Calendar/Messenger etc...

Nothing over the last decade has made me consider changing my mind about Yahoo!'s reliability. It is interesting that Voix des Airs is also complaining about Yahoo!'s mail service being unreliable. I wonder if this will change under Mayer, or Yahoo!'s offerings will continue to be made by a bunch off yahoos.

So, why would I want to give Yahoo my Dropbox account details? *sigh* Remember the days when you were supposed to keep your account details private? Sadly, we're being conditioned to routinely break the most basic of online security measures.

I think you're getting the opportunity to create a new, Yahoo-specific account here.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel with some half-assed Yahoo-branded internally-developed solution that doesn't work well, they are using the best, Dropbox. It's an "un-Yahoo-like" way of doing something, but good move, Yahoo, I applaud you for using something that already works well and users will love.

I'm happy with Outlook and Skydrive. However, it's nice to see Yahoo offer their users a very well known cloud storage solution. Let's just hope this doesn't lead to a buyout of Dropbox and then the inevitable butchering. Like what they did with Flickr.

IF, which is a big if, Mozilla decide allow the next generation of Browser Engine to be licensed as MIT and Apache 2.0, the same as Rust. Then I think Yahoo should invest a few Engineers into helping Mozilla to build the next Browsers.

IF, which is a big if, Mozilla decide allow the next generation of Browser Engine to be licensed as MIT and Apache 2.0, the same as Rust. Then I think Yahoo should invest a few Engineers into helping Mozilla to build the next Browsers.

What does that have to do with this, and what benefit would that be to Yahoo?

Also, Servo (the project you're talking about) is already licensed under the MPL, accord to its source on GitHub. Considering the current state of Servo, it's many, many, many years away from being even a toy engine, much less rendering most of the web correctly.

I wish all web apps would implement third party cloud drive access like this. I proposed a couple years ago before Google Drive was a reality, that in order for cloud computing to really catch on someone needs to invent a cloud drive standard API that would make it easy for web developers to implement once, but allow consumers to pick and choose which cloud drive they wanted to use (including a self hosted drive that supported the API).

Having one's files scattered around on 10 different web sites is not helpful when trying to do real work, especially when the web app is a small start-up company that might go under next month. No one wants to trust valuable data to a start-up. If web apps can ever start separating their data from the site/app, and people can use one of the bigger storage companies for their data, then things like a Chromebook will start to look more like a business machine and eventually real progress could happen. Maybe.

This is a nice idea to avoid the overhead and limits of attachments, but it's not clear how this works when the recipient isn't a Dropbox user. If they have to sign up to get the attachment, that's a non-starter.

I don't see any need for a recipient to be a user of Dropbox. All that's needed is a link in an email that points to a web page where the "attachment" can be downloaded.

I have held on to my original Yahoo! account for sentimental reasons, but gmail works a lot better.

I would like to see Yahoo! shake off that general air of decay and return to its former glory, if only to counter Google's dominance. But for all I know Marissa Mayer could be a plant from Google to make sure that won't happen :-)

IF, which is a big if, Mozilla decide allow the next generation of Browser Engine to be licensed as MIT and Apache 2.0, the same as Rust. Then I think Yahoo should invest a few Engineers into helping Mozilla to build the next Browsers.

Wat.

The licence Mozilla uses is nothing like the GPL, if that's what you're implying. Mozilla's licence is quite compatible with other licences, and allows you to mix its code with code licenced differently.

Situations like the Firefox/Iceweasel issue are a result of trademark issues, not licence issues.

I don't see any need for a recipient to be a user of Dropbox. All that's needed is a link in an email that points to a web page where the "attachment" can be downloaded.

...in which case I'd just PM them the public link if there's something in my Dropbox I want them to have. Why involve Yahoo! Mail at all? Frankly, I can't imagine a situation where I'd be giving a link to my DropBox to anyone in mail that I'm not talking to on IRC or through an IM client.

And if it's something like a tech support rep from somewhere I'm corresponding with, odds are that anything I have to send them (ie, screenshots) would be well under the 25MB attachment limit, anyways.

My former ISP in the UK, BT, outsourced their email to Yahoo years ago and I have used it for approx 13 years now. I also use Gmail and Outlook (formerly Hotmail).

Whilst Yahoo's email client isn't bad and has been updated several times since I started using it, it has two annoying flaws as far as I'm concerned.

1) The browser back button.If I hit the back button when reading an email, Gmail and Outlook gracefully take me back to the Inbox. Not Yahoo, it dumps me straight out of Yahoo . This can be sooo annoying. Say you are doing a search and you hit the back button, poof your search results are lost are you are dumped straight out of Yahoo.

2) Disposable Email addresses.When I set up one of these, the one thing I always want to do is to copy and paste the new email address into whatever web form I'm filling in. This used to be easy until some idiot redesigned the interface. Now I have to copy the email address in two parts and then reassemble the whole in Notepad, before then being able to use it. Doh!

These are just small annoyances but they are the sort of niggles that make users like me want to move off Yahoo. Incidentally, I would have reported these issues to Yahoo but they insist I do this via BT, but judging from the support website, BT have no interest in their former baby. So I gave up!

I don't see any need for a recipient to be a user of Dropbox. All that's needed is a link in an email that points to a web page where the "attachment" can be downloaded.

...in which case I'd just PM them the public link if there's something in my Dropbox I want them to have. Why involve Yahoo! Mail at all? Frankly, I can't imagine a situation where I'd be giving a link to my DropBox to anyone in mail that I'm not talking to on IRC or through an IM client.

And if it's something like a tech support rep from somewhere I'm corresponding with, odds are that anything I have to send them (ie, screenshots) would be well under the 25MB attachment limit, anyways.

I can think of a use case where I would want to upload to Dropbox a file I received by mail, and have it moved automatically to my account, having it updated in each of my devices connected to that Dropbox account.

This is a nice idea to avoid the overhead and limits of attachments, but it's not clear how this works when the recipient isn't a Dropbox user. If they have to sign up to get the attachment, that's a non-starter.

I don't see any need for a recipient to be a user of Dropbox. All that's needed is a link in an email that points to a web page where the "attachment" can be downloaded.

I don't see any need for a recipient to be a user of Dropbox. All that's needed is a link in an email that points to a web page where the "attachment" can be downloaded.

...in which case I'd just PM them the public link if there's something in my Dropbox I want them to have. Why involve Yahoo! Mail at all? Frankly, I can't imagine a situation where I'd be giving a link to my DropBox to anyone in mail that I'm not talking to on IRC or through an IM client.

And if it's something like a tech support rep from somewhere I'm corresponding with, odds are that anything I have to send them (ie, screenshots) would be well under the 25MB attachment limit, anyways.

I think (no expert here) it might be that it does the upload and decision process for you. Say you have an album of pictures you want to send to a friend. Within the Yahoo webclient you click "Add Attachment" and browse your hard drive for the files. The Yahoo webclient sees that it is larger than 25 mb and uploads the files to your Dropbox account with permissions set for the recipient to download.

So the advantage lies in the automated process instead of manually checking the file size, uploading to Dropbox, and then sending the link. Not useful for you perhaps but for my mother.... she already has her email open and has no clue how big the file is. My guess might be way off but we must remember a lot of these new setups are not for the geeks of the world and are instead making things simpler for people that assume a little wizard lives inside the magic computer box.

This is a nice idea to avoid the overhead and limits of attachments, but it's not clear how this works when the recipient isn't a Dropbox user. If they have to sign up to get the attachment, that's a non-starter.

I would assume it would work like most other cloud-storage and file-sharing sites, where files or documents can be made public (or open from specific sources). They could pretty easily create permissions for the file where it can be accessed "openly" from a link (or path) generated by Yahoo. I don't use Dropbox, so I don't know for sure, but I'd be surprised if they don't have something like this already.

I'm still waiting for Yahoo to build in a not incredibly easy to hack into feature as well. I changed my password to 100% random 10+ character passwords 3 times, and each time it still got hacked. Number of times my gmail account has been hacked in the past almost 10 years? Zero.

In a related announcement, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer said the integrated Dropbox won't be available to Yahoo! staff, because without the scourge of teleworking they already have all their files with them anyway at the office.

I'm still waiting for Yahoo to build in a not incredibly easy to hack into feature as well. I changed my password to 100% random 10+ character passwords 3 times, and each time it still got hacked. Number of times my gmail account has been hacked in the past almost 10 years? Zero.

If there's one thing we should have learned from all of the high-profile hacks of the past few decades (the Sony one probably being the most memorable and clear-cut), it's that the complexity of your password is irrelevant if the company's security is flawed. It's like having a bank-safe-level lock costing tens-of-thousands of dollars mounted in your wooden front door. All that security is worthless if your burglar brings an ax.

My most urgent pressing need is for the apple mail client on my family's various macs to stop having authentication problems (and always asking for the damn yahoo p/w - no similar problem exists with our many iOS devices.)

I've seen this too and it got so bad at one point that I tried connecting to Yahoo!'s IMAP server from a shell to see what was going on. The error that Yahoo! was returning, after the username/password were sucessfully entered, was not a login failure but some sort of "Server Unavailable" message. For some reason (I don't know much about IMAP so maybe this is correct, but I think that it might not be) Mail.app is reporting this to the user as a password failure. I suspect that the same thing is going on is regardless of platform (I don't know why it wouldn't be) but either just being ignored and another login attempt made at whatever the scheduled interval is or reported as something else. So it looks (to me) like Yahoo!'s servers are having a problem and Mail.app is reporting the problem to the user incorrectly. But anyone out there who actually knows IMAP please correct me if I am wrong.

And just FYI in case you didn't know... I've found that if when you get one of these messages from Mail.app you just click "Cancel" you will be fine (until the next time that it happens of course, then just clock "Cancel" again). You don't have to actually enter you password every time (which is really useful if, like me, you don't actually know your password because it looks something like this: $3#41xTe"PpX ).